Tag Archives | Citrix

A recent article on Microsoft’s Ask the Directory Services Team blog piqued my interest. It talks about how leaked access tokens prevent logon sessions to be freed when the user logs off. This wastes system resources that can only be reclaimed by rebooting. A symptom of this happening is that RDS session IDs are not […]

Update: KB4022723 seems to fix the black lock screen issue described in this article. The Spotlight feature of Windows 10 shows beautiful images on the lock screen. Annoyingly, it appears to be broken on many machines, showing a black screen instead of a pretty photograph. Read on for the cause and a workaround. (more…)

I just had a situation where I was facing an empty desktop with no way to logoff, start a program or do anything else. The only thing left to do was to log the session off from an admin session. This got me thinking: how many ways are there to create such a situation? I […]

Do you know the maximum number of users each of your terminal servers can host with acceptable performance? You may have found out the hard way how many are too many – but how many are just right? Farm sizing and server capacity planning are typical tasks for consultants who often have a hard time […]

When you buy a new HP server it comes with the BIOS setting HP Power Profile set to Balanced Power and Performance. That sounds good but is bad – at least for CPU performance in a VDI environment. (more…)

Even if you only have a moderately sized VDI deployment chances are high you will face the problem of getting USB smart card readers to work on the virtual desktops. Given that this is such a basic requirement it is astonishingly hard to implement correctly. To save you the pain of having to start from […]

What do I do for a living? I travel to community conferences, of course. In 2012 I spent 44 days going to 10 different conferences – err, wait, that is I would love to earn a living that way, but of course I have to work like everybody else. Nevertheless, having my own company I […]

Ron Kuper asked in a comment why the architecture of Citrix Profile Management was changed from being based on mandatory profiles to capturing the entire profile content by default. This change happened between versions 1 and 2. A Bit of History Citrix Profile Management is based on the product sepagoPROFILE, which I architected and co-developed. […]

This article is part of a mini-series. You can find the other articles here. In the previous part of this series we saw how to determine the capacity of a server farm. This time we will look at how that capacity is utilized, in other words at farm load. As before we will do that […]

This article is part of a mini-series. You can find the other articles here. As we have seen in part 1 of this series, when sizing a new farm the first thing we need to know is the capacity of the existing farm. Armed with data on capacity and additionally load, we can easily calculate […]

This article is part of Helge’s Profile Toolkit, a set of posts explaining the knowledge and tools required to tame Windows user profiles. Setting up a network share on a file server for hosting user profiles is not too difficult if you follow the steps outlined in this article. The recommendations I give here apply […]

I just returned from Citrix’ bi-annual Synergy event in Barcelona. I am not going to summarize the event here (others have done that better than I could, e.g. Gabe Knuth or Nico Lüdemann). Instead I have a few pictures to share. I would like to mention, though, that Synergy is the best way to connect […]

Managing Internet Explorer via group policy is a daunting task. Hundreds of policies are available to control the browser’s user interface, security settings and much more. This article lists strategies and scripts I have found helpful. (more…)

This is a summary of my experience with Active Setup combined with the information I could find on the internet. What is Active Setup and How Does it Work? Active Setup is a mechanism for executing commands once per user early during logon. Active Setup is used by some operating system components like Internet Explorer […]

Citrix User Profile Manager is pretty well-known in the SBC space today. Five years ago, things were quite different. Citrix did not have a user profile solution, and neither did sepago. But we had an idea spinning in our heads we soon came to call Smooth Profiles. Slowly that idea became code, then was renamed […]

Windows Beginning with Vista, when formatting a drive the entire disk is overwritten with zeroes. While this is good for end users who like to wipe all data prior to selling or throwing away a disk drive, SAN-based volumes should not be formatted like this. Perform a quick format instead. But if you want to […]

I just returned from my first CTP (Citrix Technology Professional) meeting and thought I might share a few experiences. The meeting took place in one of Citrix’s headquarter buildings in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The meeting itself ran over two days, which means that most attendees were away from home and work for four. While that […]

It seems the Citrix community had only had one topic recently, albeit one discussed hotly: licensing. Now that Citrix has given in and practically allowed all conceivable license types, everybody is happy?! It seems so, although CCU licenses have doubled in price, as Shawn Bass points out. But is this really the happy ending of […]

Terminal server application compatibility scripts have been around for a long time – so long in fact, that I considered them a legacy and stowed away any knowledge of them in a very remote area of my brain. When a Citrix customer brought up a problem with the mapping of ROOTDRIVE in the User Profile […]

Even with the most meticulous design, the day will come when your farm’s capacity is not sufficient any more. User numbers increase, applications become more resource-hungry and the amount of data to be handled increases steadily. So what do you do? Simply more of the same, i.e. buy more servers and add them to the […]

Jim Moyle recently started a blog on desktop and application delivery. While reading his first two posts I thought “yes, that’s so right“. Regretfully, people like him, who disregard the current hype and cut through the marketing BS, are scarce. More of the same, please! (more…)

Do you like what you read in this blog but have questions I did not answer (yet)? Or do you prefer listening and talking to live human beings instead of sitting alone in front of your screen? Well, come hear me speak and tell me what you think! This summer I will be speaking at […]